4 years in the making: Bavaria’s food blog

For the past 30 years, Lady Hammerstein has been selling second-hand books in Munich. At the renown Hans Hammerstein bookstore on Türkenstr. 37, in good company of her mom.

Her much read culinary diary has generated 1,361 entries, 340 per year, and has been four years in the making. An average of 187 recipes get published every year.

Food blogs are blogs with a difference, their content is genuine, no mashup of third parties content. Hammerstein’s blog adds only fresh content to the web. Step photos document each meal, followed by the occasional recipe or a story of her shopping for ingredients.

When fellow bloggers told Petra, her Alexa ranking would top theirs, she found out that she had a large following in South Africa. ‘The Courage of Others’ receives 2,000 page views per day. A reliable readership with slow but steady growth and around 69 percent new visitors.

Before → After
From newspaper to magazine format.

Now we have redesigned her culinary diary. According to the – only recent – drastic change of global web standards to achieve a more reliable mobile usage.

Lucinda Grande the font face used for copy is most comfortable to read. It makes for an adorable pretentiousness free impression; it also was Apple’s OS font for the past 10 years. With the ongoing simplification in digital media, typography is back as the dominating characteristic.

In the four years we learned to direct our attention toward what is useful and what to toss aside for its lack of utility. Requirements for long tail marketing are build around continuity. And for continuity, stripping down to the essentials is a necessity. What isn’t there can become more meaningful than what is.

You may not want to fetishise exaggerated art School aesthetics. Play all too obviously into the hands of feuilletonists or fraternise with deliberate windbags. Rather have them play by your rules.

Title and headline type is a reflection of a natural closeness to butchers and meat markets. Their often clumsy treatment of typography for flyers, menu slips and signs. Andy is the typeface designed by Steve Matteson. An offense for Derek Clark’s clean design.

Erik Spiekermann on the break with Lucinda Grande in iOS 7

The old newspaper format mirrors the handcrafted, authentic look of the early blogosphere. Hammerstein’s food porn step photos are bigger now on brighter retina displays. Magazines are becoming blogs and blogs are becoming magazines.